David Wells Quote

Many of you may not know who David Wells is, but he is an excellent writer and seminary professor for Gordon Conwell. This is a quote from his book The Courage to be Protestant. He is bit of a headsy writer and can even get a little deep for me, but he has some powerful words that ring true about people trying to self-produce what only God can do.

"Self-made faith does not have in itself the power to remake human nature. So much evangelical church practice, so much of its preaching, so much of what people have come to think of as being evangelical, is actually self-oriented, not God-centered. It is about what we do, about what we get, not about what God has done or about what he gives in Christ. It is about getting what we want as religious consumers, not about receiving what God has given us in Christ's death in our place and in his written Word."

"Our lives, though, are nourished not by spiritual experiences we can seek, but by God applying to us the truth of his Word. If it is true that all our experimenting with "doing church," all our marketing, all our cultural adaptation, has produced nothing but the sickly results Barna keeps reporting, then it should be no surprise that people are going off looking for some other kind of spirituality that will be more authentic."

1 Corinthians 3 (NIV)

7So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. 9For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building.
10By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. 11For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. 14If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.